My dad was in purchasing for various aircraft manufacturers, including McDonnell Douglas and Boeing.

It was literally his job to try and keep this nonsense under control.

It was extremely frequent that the engineers would request some screw with hyper specific requirements and would end up costing dozens of dollars or so per screw. Even more for the specialized tooling that would go with it.

From his perspective, the engineers loved designing new things rather than looking up, if anything previously existed.

So he would try and take the requirements and see if there was some off-the-shelf substitution that would meet the requirements. Saved companies a fortune again and again.